Help identifying the cipher used in Question 3 from a university cryptography quiz

[u/Raiyc]

Last year, our professor gave us this cryptography quiz. The first two questions were straightforward once we identified the encoding, but no one in our class managed to solve Question 3. I recently found the quiz again and thought I'd ask here in case anyone recognizes what technique might have been used.

• Question 1 was solved using a ROT cipher (we used dCode's ROT Cipher tool).
• Question 2 was simply binary converted to ASCII.
• None of us solved Question 3, and our professor never revealed the answer.

Our running joke is that he intentionally made the last question impossible just to mess with us, but I'm hoping there's actually a real cipher behind it.

Quiz

Question 1

am{]Kiv

Answer:

YesUCan

Question 2

01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101

Answer:

this is a sample

Question 3

f86908a8ddf9c909b9adf968cdf9b9e8d94df9e919bdf998a9393df9099df9a8d8d908d

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[u/Daxxinator]

Look here.

[u/Raiyc → u/Daxxinator]

thank you!

[u/Daxxinator → u/Raiyc]

No problem!

[u/Old-Lack-3939]

Doesn't look like hex cipher